His (A Dark Erotic Romance Novel) Read online

  Anyway, there was no way I would ever date that guy. Apart from the fact that he was way out of my league, he apparently didn’t date. And the way he looked at me was... weird.

  “No,” I said, picking a book up to reshelve it and casting one last glance over at the closed elevator.

  “Kat, how could you do this to me? That guy was like, Fabio. You passed up the chance of a lifetime.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, trying not to give myself away. Lucky for me, I blush at the drop of a hat, so Jules could believe that I was all hot and bothered by nothing more than standing at Fabio’s side in an elevator. I knew differently. That kiss was something I wanted to keep a secret. For some reason, I thought that the man with the cold gray-green eyes would feel the same way.

  “Guess I am boring after all.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gav

  I reached the fourth floor and passed by the man I was going to kill later. His cologne was horribly overpowering; I could smell it as I crossed behind him, one aisle of books away. The shadow came with me, urging me on. I pushed it back. Patience. Yes. We would have to be patient. But as I walked down the aisle, I thought that maybe I could kill a week early. He was going through exactly the same motions as he had the week before, and the week before that.

  Maybe an early kill. If the parking lot was clear. If I had the opportunity. I smiled, glad that I had thought to bring the syringe with me. I tried to make every tracking as much like the real thing as possible. Preparation. Yes. That’s what separated the good killer from the great.

  I picked out a book at random and opened it up, holding it in front of me without seeing the words. The man shuffled his feet and stood, indecisive, in front of the shelves.

  Pick one, I thought. You won’t get to read it, anyway.

  The smell of the book in my hands was an old smell, the smell of paper rotting into dust. Libraries were resting homes for all of the dying books. Dead books, dead authors. Incredible, that characters could live so much longer than the people who wrote them. A character in a book might live forever, as long as there was someone there to read him and remember him.

  We, though, are mortal, and I do not expect anyone to remember me.

  And certainly, nobody will remember him.

  The man took a book from the shelf and I followed carefully, taking the stairs on the opposite side. I didn’t want to see the girl again, for she might remember me. The girl who kissed me.

  I remembered only her eyes. They were brown and sad. I cannot tell you anything else about her, though. She came and went like any other woman in my life, in and out before I could care enough to remember. My thoughts were only on the syringe in my pocket and the man whose life I would steal away before he harmed the world any more than he already has.

  Maybe his wife will remember him, I thought. I smiled. I thought of myself as a kind of assassin, one who worked for free. A pro bono hit man. Charity work, not murder.

  We were down the stairs. I followed him to the counter and out the door. He had the book in his hands. He would never get the chance to read it. Poor characters in the book. They would die too, being left unread.

  He crossed the parking lot and I followed him, checking around the library. Nobody was there. I could do it tonight, yes. The preparations were nearly done. Why not? I deserved a bit of respite from the shadow.

  Sometimes the world makes itself just right. The wind blows a certain way. People walk with puppet strings attached to their limbs, and I feel like the puppet master. That was how he walked, across the parking lot toward the place where I would take him.

  I had made up my mind. I would do it tonight, a week early. It was the perfect opportunity, and I would not pass it up.

  He was at his car and I was there at my car next to him where I had left it, trunk unlocked. Before he could open the door, I spoke out loud, angrily.

  “Did you see who parked on the other side of me? Some asshole keyed my car door.”

  The man raised his eyebrows and came around to my side of the car. He was curious. Perfect.

  We’re all excited to see destruction, of course. We all want to stare at the damage someone else has caused. I’m just more honest than everyone else. I don’t wait for the damage to come to me. I go out and find it.

  Oh, the man. Yes. Him. One plunge of the syringe was all it took, and he was already unconscious. It only took a second more to toss him into the trunk. The book went on top of his limp body.

  Patience had gone out the window. I was so lucky to have had a clear shot, and the adrenaline that rushes through me when I took it – it was like nothing else.

  Excitement pumped through my veins as I got into the car and drove away, the body in my trunk. Tonight I would cut off his abusive hands and carve a knife deep into his skin until the tendons pop. I expected that he would cry. Most of them do. I expected that he would beg for mercy. The shadow would retreat with the sounds of his screams. I would hurt him for myself, and for the people he had hurt. He would beg me to let him live.

  And then, later, he would beg to die.

  Kat

  Jules was right. I was boring as hell. I wrote my phone number down on a scrap of paper and ran downstairs after the guy to give it to him, but I couldn’t even bring myself to follow him outside. It looked like he was going to talk to that other guy, the professor with the creepy mustache who always checks out the legal thrillers.

  I didn’t want to bother him. Bother them. I didn’t want to be a bother to anyone.

  When I die, they’re going to write it on my tombstone:

  Here lies Kat, the boringest girl ever and totally chickenshit. At least she didn’t bother anybody.

  I don’t know if you’re allowed to swear on gravestones, though.

  Sighing, I threw the rest of the audiobooks down into the crate to go out for interlibrary loan. Stupid me. I should have run after him. Even if he said he didn’t date. That night I lay in bed and thought about his eyes. Thought if I should have gone after him. I’d never felt that kind of chemistry with any guy before. What if he was my one true love, and this was my one chance to get with him? Okay, maybe that was a bit melodramatic, but still. I started looking at every guy who came through the library doors to see if it was him. He didn’t come back.

  The next day, I felt somewhat better about not giving him my phone number. What kind of a guy kisses a girl back in an elevator? Even if I did start it, , I told myself that I needed to kiss another guy and get over it. There weren’t any cute guys in the library, though, and the only person who got on the elevator with me was a sixty year old professor with white hair tufting out of his freckled ears. I sighed and pushed the cart back into the storage room.

  “Still thinking about Fabio?”

  “Ugh, Jules, shut up.”

  “He dropped something up in the stacks yesterday.”

  “What?”

  Jules pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it over to me.

  “I was just going to throw it away, but you’re mooning over this guy hard. Maybe if you see him again, you can give it to him.”

  I unfolded the slip of paper. It had a few lines of numbers written down on it, a code or something. Next to one of the lines, the word important was underlined twice.

  “What is this?”

  “Beats me. Maybe you can ask him to explain it to you when you see him.”

  “I’m not going to see him.” I’d already resigned myself to not ever finding him again. Okay, yes, I was boring. But I also wasn’t about to go chasing a guy who had already told me he didn’t date. What kind of guy didn’t date? It was the politest brushoff I’d ever gotten.

  “If you see him, then you can talk to him again. How about that?”

  “How about you butt out of my beeswax?”

  I crumpled the paper and stuffed it into my back pocket.

  “Sure, I’ll butt out. So you’re going to keep it?”

  “Shut up.”

 
; “Shutting up!” Jules grinned and took the carton of discard books from me. “Shutting up right... now!”

  Later I came into the back room to find Jules staring at the television in the break room. With a pile of old textbooks in my arms, I came and stood in front of her.

  “Get out of the way!” Jules kicked out with her foot and knocked a textbook off the top of my stack.

  “Earth to Jules, we work in a library. What are you doing watching TV?”

  “You’ll never guess who got murdered,” she said.

  “The president,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Your mom.”

  “No. Jesus, Kat, that’s insensitive. What if my mom was murdered?”

  “Who, then?” I let the pile of textbooks slump to the table near me and turned to the television screen. If our boss wasn’t around, I guess a bit of TV wouldn’t hurt.

  “That guy that comes in every couple weeks,” Jules said, motioning to the screen where a police captain was being interviewed.

  “That’s really specific.”

  “The professor who reads the shitty John Grisham knockoffs. You know, the one with the creepy look.”

  “No way.” The screen switched over to a shot of the man with the mustache. I’d seen him just a few days earlier. He’d been checking out a book. Idly, I wondered if his family would bring back the book to the library.

  “Way,” Jules said.

  “Someone murdered him?”

  “Well, he’s missing, anyway.”

  “So he’s not murdered.”

  “Oh, sure, he ran away to Costa Rica and left his wife and kid and six figure job. Yeah, right. Trust me, he was murdered. God, you have such a boring mind.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who was murdered before.”

  “Well, now you do,” Jules said, turning off the TV just as Sheryl rounded the corner, her face stuck in that perpetually pissed-off look that some bosses have. “And now he’s dead. Back to work, slacker.”

  Gav

  I told him not to move when I shaved his mustache off. He moved. Then the tablecloth was bloody. He didn’t start to scream until I began to shave a little deeper.

  It was beautiful.

  The begging, too, that was delicious to hear. It drove the shadow away. The blood spilled and made a mess, but it had to happen. He’d hurt his wife, and now he was being hurt. It made a kind of sense, didn’t it? And I did so love to hear him beg.

  So many promises, this one.

  “Let me go, and I’ll give you anything. As much money as you want.” His voice was whining, needy.

  I gestured around me with my knife.

  “You’ve seen my house,” I said. “Do you think I need money?”

  “What do you want, then? Please. Please! I’ll give you anything.”

  I couldn’t wait to cut out his tongue. Maybe in a few days. I poured water over his face and he drank it, lapped it up greedily like a dog. A thought was nagging me at the back of my head. Something I had forgotten. But no, I hadn’t forgotten anything. There were no tracks for anyone to follow.

  The young woman at the library, the one who kissed me, came floating into mind. I pushed the thought away. Maybe I would go back and return the book, retrace my tracks, make sure I hadn’t missed anything. What could I have missed? Still, the nagging thought at the back of my brain kept itching. The shadow darkened my vision and brought me back to my world, to the dead man who did not know he was dead lying on my kitchen table.

  “Please,” he continued. “What can I do? What do you want from me?”

  “Right now?” I raised my eyebrows. “Right now, I want you to suffer.”

  “Suff-” his words cut off as I came towards him again with the knife. “No, please. Oh god, please, no!”

  “Scream,” I whispered, bringing my knife down to his cheek.

  He obliged.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kat

  It was a few days more before the man came back to the library, fifteen minutes before closing. Not the mustache man—Jules was right about that, he was gone for good, probably murdered—but the handsome one. The one I’d kissed. The dark-haired, light-eyed Fabio.

  Boring old me stayed away. I didn’t want to scare him off. This was the only time he’d been back since the first time I’d seen him, when I’d kissed him. And as strict as Sheryl was about helping library patrons, I thought that I would be more help not scaring him out of the library again with a random kiss.

  I stayed in the kids’ section and shelved picture books, watching as he went up into the stacks and dreaming about all of the dark, terrible, wonderful things he could do to me if he had me in bed. Then he came back down and started to head out of the library. .

  My hand reached back into my jeans pocket. I hadn’t done laundry in two weeks, and the slip of paper was still stuffed into my back pocket. I pulled it out and looked at it. Random numbers and letters. But it was something to start a conversation about. I could talk to him.

  “Hey, you dropped this last time you were here. So what’s important about this code, anyway?”

  I didn’t know why I was so hell-bent on talking to him again, anyway. If anyone asked, I would probably tell them it was Jules breaking my balls, calling me boring every two minutes and asking me if I’d ever kiss a boy again. I wasn’t boring, dammit!

  But the real reason I clocked out early and scooted after him?

  I wanted to kiss him again.

  I wanted to feel that passion.

  I wanted to know if his mind was as dark as mine.

  In the parking lot, I saw him get into a silver Kia sedan. A boring car, Jules would say. He was too far away to run after, and I thought about giving up and going back inside. Finishing up the picture books section. He probably didn’t need the slip of paper, anyway.

  But then I changed my mind. The kids’ books could wait. What if the paper I had from him was super important? What if he was a secret agent and the paper I had was a secret code? And—bigger question—what if he kissed me again? So I hopped into my black Honda Civic, possibly the only car more boring than a silver Kia, and drove off after him.

  I’d seen enough cop shows to know how to tail someone. Stay behind, but not too far behind. Don’t let traffic lights get between you. Have a boring car. Check! It also helped that the car between us was full of five college frat boys hanging out the windows and blasting music. If he ever looked in his rearview mirror, all he would see was Animal House on wheels.

  A rush of excitement went through me as I followed him. I was off work, and instead of going out to bars, I was chasing a sexy guy who might even be a secret agent! There was no way Jules could call me boring after this. Okay, so he probably wasn’t a secret agent. But at least I could pretend he was for now.

  I crawled behind him from light to light, and he never noticed me. I supposed that this might be a good career for an average-looking girl with an average-looking figure. Men never noticed me: I would make a great undercover cop. I made a mental note to ask the career counselor about it.

  Soon, he turned off of the main street and headed out of town. I lagged behind; there weren’t any intersections on this road. He kept driving, and more than once I thought that I was crazy to keep following him.

  Why? Why did I keep following?

  I don’t know, not really. I wanted to see what was hidden in those eyes. I wanted to know what the important code was. I wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t date. Or if it was just that he wouldn’t date me. There was something mysterious about chasing after a guy I didn’t know, and my heart beat faster as I drove, excitement pumping through my veins.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed Jules. At least I could let her know where I was, in case this guy did turn out to be a secret agent. But the little bars on my screen were gone: no reception out here in the mountains. Frowning, I tossed my phone down on the passenger seat. I would just have to tell her about my adventure later.

 
His car led me to the outside of town and into the nearby mountains. I slowed even more. The sun was dipping down below the tops of the mountains and I could see his red taillights clearly as he took the curves around the mountain bends.

  What on earth was I doing? I was wasting so much gas driving out here. For a split second I considered turning around, but then his car turned into a long driveway. I drove up to the driveway just as his car went around the curve inside. I parked on the dirt pullout and hopped out.

  Maybe I should just leave the slip of paper in his mailbox. The metal gate that barred the driveway was swinging shut slowly. I really shouldn’t go running off after him. What would he think of me showing up on his doorstep, with nothing but a stupid scrap of paper with some numbers on it?

  But it said IMPORTANT.

  Just as the gate was about to shut, I darted inside. The metal clanged as the gate locked behind me.

  “Seriously, Kat,” I said to myself. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I felt utterly stupid. I had driven all the way out here, and for what? Nothing. I considered my options:

  1. Climb back over the fence, go home, and feel like an idiot.

  2. Ring the doorbell and... feel like an idiot.

  “ARGH!” I pressed my forehead against the metal gate, looking at my car through the bars. This was ridiculous.

  “Yes, this is ridiculous, Kat,” I told myself. “You wanted to play Nancy Drew, well, here’s your goddamn chance. Stop being a boring idiot. Okay? Okay.”

  With that settled, I turned around and looked up the curving driveway in the middle of the forest. Every step I took put one more butterfly in my stomach

  I couldn’t even see his house from the road. Huge pine trees cut off the view after about fifty feet of road. I swallowed. If he was a secret agent, wouldn’t he have some kind of security system? What if I got shot or caught in a trap before I reached the house?